EVE Online studio CCP is making a medieval-style tome of epic poetry inked with the blood of players to commemorate the game: 'It turns out, to store information, a really good way is to take blood and write on calfskin'
At the close of this year's EVE Fanfest, CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson took the stage to announce a surprising new commemoration of the long-running sci-fi MMO: An epic poem in the style of the ancient Icelandic sagas, written on genuine vellum in—and here's the kicker—the blood of EVE Online fans. Did I mention they'd be giving it freely?
"We're obsessing about this 'foreverness,'" said Pétursson. "It turns out, to store information, a really good way is to take blood and write on calfskin. And people in Iceland were doing this 1,000 years ago, and you still have the books."
At the opening of the convention, CCP revealed an upcoming project to make a book of epic poetry to capture some of the key moments, ideas, and themes of EVE's player-driven history. This "Foundational Poem" will be edited by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, who will be pulling from "various traditions" across the globe with help from a "network of poets."
At the closing ceremony, Pétursson elaborated on some unique limited editions of the work that will very much not be for sale. CCP will commission a to-be-determined number of the medieval-style manuscripts through an expert in the process. "They mainly worked for the Pope and the British empire," quipped Pétursson. "But now they work for us."
"We're going to put one of the books in [Icelandic manuscript museum] Arnastofnun next to the sagas," Pétursson continued. "Then we're gonna put one, I don't know, in the Pyramids, Library of Congress, something. We'll figure that out."
Fans of EVE will be able to by a more normal version of the epic poem for their own homes, but CCP also plans on letting them make a very direct contribution to the archive copies.
"We're gonna get the Blood Bank of Iceland to be here at the next Fanfest," said Pétursson. "You can donate blood for the good of the Blood Bank of Iceland, but we'll take a little bit at a time from every Fanfest attendee, and then we'll mix it up, and we'll use it to write the poetry."
EVE's next Fanfest is scheduled for May of 2026, so you've got a year to stay hydrated, keep your iron up, and avoid any pesky bloodborne illnesses if you'd like your precious humors to grace the pages of the prime time version of EVE's Foundational Poem.
This isn't the first time CCP has made such a grand effort to commemorate the game and its community. To celebrate ten years of EVE, the studio commissioned a monument at Reykjavik's harbor with the names of every EVE player engraved on it, and another section was added with new players included for the 20th anniversary.
In addition to EVE Online, whose latest expansion, Legion, is coming on May 27, CCP is also currently working on a sister FPS, Vanguard. If that concept sounds familiar, it's because Vanguard is CCP's second attempt at some of the ambitions of its ill-starred, PlayStation 3-exclusive shooter, Dust 514. CCP is also developing EVE Frontier, an experimental, survival-focused space game with an ambitious approach to player modding.
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